A survey of this fall’s best new cookbooks

Whether browsing the aisles of your local bookstore or being assaulted with a “recommended” list every time you open Amazon.ca, the fall season’s cookbook glut is hard to ignore. Herein, the Post’s Nathalie Atkinson surveys the season’s most delectable pages.

The personalities

It’s a general rule of entertaining to never try a recipe for the first time on guests. Ina Garten always takes that maxim to heart but never more so than in her latest book, Barefoot Contessa Foolproof (Clarkson Potter, $40). These are recipes, she says, that you can trust.

“I’ve highlighted all the speed bumps and the blind spots along the way,” Garten writes in the foreword, and that extends equally whether it’s her simple Tuscan mashed chickpeas or mustard-marinated flank steak or 1770 House meatloaf (a recipe borrowed from the East Hampton restaurant’s executive chef Kevin Penner). Garten’s recent home renovation gave her the dubious gift of a new oven, which now has her thinking in terms of menu-planning like most single-oven families. All the better for us!

PBS chef Lidia Bastianich also calls the 100 Italian dishes in Lidia’s Favorite Recipes (Knopf, $27.95) “foolproof.” They’re her personal favourites from over the years of her food shows, revised and updated with helpful hints.

I always figured that when the cameras stop rolling, the rolling pin does, too, but superstar everywoman cook Rachael Ray insists there’s life after the final take. Ray’s upcoming My Year In Meals (Atria, $29.95, out mid-November) chronicles the meals she makes for real, after she’s made meals at her televised day job.

From page views to page-turners

The editors at Epicurious.com have taken the best four-fork rates recipes from their popular website and for The Epicurious Cookbook (Appetite, $29.99), combined them with reader favourites and offerings from star chefs — such as Tom Colicchio’s herb-butter turkey — into a compendium with beautiful photographs by Ellen Silverman. Informative tips from the site’s commenting home cooks populate the margins, as do menu ideas. Simple favourites range from steak with Parmesan butter and balsamic glaze to a stellar spicy mac and cheese with pancetta.

In the blog-to-cookbook department, Deb Perelman’s wildly popular food site is now The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (Appetite, $35) and two-thirds of the more than 100 recipes are vegetarian.

Aficionados of Alan Ball’s southern Gothic soap were clamoring for dishes from the fictional Bon Temps (they were already swapping fan-fic recipes online), so the showrunner gave them a real-world cookbook. True Blood, the cookbook, includes scene-accurate recreations of bayou recipes from the TV drama, down to resident temptress Pam Swynford de Beaufort’s elixir, Vampade — potable for humans but, yes, it’s the colour of fresh blood.

Specialized diets

Before opening his popular vegan restaurant, Aaron Ash was the personal chef to Beastie Boy Mike D. Gorilla Food (Arsenal Pulp, $24.95) is inspired by the menu at the Vancouver chef’s busy restaurant and his guide to living and eating organic, vegan and raw includes recipes for basics, such as buckwheat pizza crusts or walnut-based “cheese.” Ash’s killer apple pie might even taste better than its traditional counterpart (among other things, the crust is made with almonds, sunflower seeds, dates, coconut oil and shredded coconut).

Emeril Lagasse’s daughters Jilly and Jessie were brought up on their chef father’s famous Louisiana cooking except — bam! — nearly a decade ago they discovered they both had celiac disease. The result is The Gluten-Free Table (Grand Central, $29.99), a book of Southern-style recipes adapted — with help from dad — for the gluten-free lifestyle.

Notable mention goes to Amanda Cohen and Ryan Dunlavey’s recent DirtCandy: A Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, $39.99). Not only is it the best way to eat the food of the hard-to-get-into New York vegetarian resto, it’s takes a cue from Japanese cooking manga and comes in entertaining graphic novel form. In addition to the broccoli ice cream and beet pasta recipes, characters from the restaurant kitchen come alive on the page.

Insider dish

For the upcoming CookFight (Ecco, $32), former New YorkTimes restaurant critic Frank Bruni pitted New York Times reporter Jody Eddy and bureau chief Christine Carroll in a friendly face-off against one another in a series of entertaining culinary challenges.

In the wee hours and between sittings, what do the staff at restaurants gobble? Come In, We’re Closed (Running Press, $38) goes behind the swinging door to 25 restaurants and finds out, from London’s Fat Duck to Napa’s Ad Hoc. In Philadelphia, the staff at Moriomoto dine on Japanese beef curry. At Montreal’s Au Pied de Cochon? Smoked sturgeon papparedelle and pizza.

Culinary journeys

I have to wait until Christmas for the publication of Giorgio Locatelli’s exploratory (and sure to be definitive) Taste of Sicilycookbook, but the following selections satisfy both my foodie peregrinations and armchair travel inclinations.

Academic turned award-winning chef Maricel Presilla spent several decades exploring Latin cuisine in its many guises — across the Caribbean, Mexico and throughout the rest of Latin America. In her masterpiece Gran Cocina Latina (Norton, $47.50), Presilla acts as culinary tour guide through regions and ingredients (from spices to lesser-known vegetables) to the cultural history and execution of variations on tamales, which get their own chapter.

Francine Prose writes the foreword to Saveur: The Way We Cook (Weldon Owen, $39.95), a day in the life look at home cooks. The anthropological premise reads as if National Geographic were incarnate as celebrity chef: the pages travel from the American South and include pit masters at barbecue restaurants across Arkansas, Tennessee and the Carolinas (and their recipes) to a woman gathering the ingredients to make the udon noodles that are the specialty of Kagawa Prefecture, Japan.

“Intensely green ride paddies, water everywhere, and soft gray clouds and mist draped in patches on the horizon: those were my first images of Burma as the small plane came circling in to land in Rangoon 30 years ago. It was July, the heart of the rainy season.” Naomi Duguid is the co-author of six previous cookbooks and is as much an accomplished cook as she is an evocative storyteller — as her James Beard and other awards attest. This time in Burma: Rivers of Flavour (Random House, $39.95) she is flying solo, and captures the intersection of Myanmar’s flavourful influences from the Indian subcontinent, China and Southeast Asia — from fish steamed with aromatics to curries — in a cookbook-cum-travelogue, lavish with photographs.

Chef friends Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi take on Jerusalem (Ten Speed Press, $35) and all that its food means to inhabitants with social, not political, anthropology. They move from one-pot wonders such as maqluba (rice, vegetables and meat, upside-down) to detailing the Friday lunchtime rituals of kubbeh in soup around Machne Yehuda market, and the Palestinian tradition of Sfiha or Lahm Bi’ajeen, a lamb-topped dough not unlike pizza.

Suzanne Husseini divides her time between Dubai and Ottawa and her Modern Flavors of Arabia (Appetite, $29.95) makes dishes accessible for the contemporary, time-pressed Western cook. There’s tabbouleh, of course, but she also includes an easier and healthier way to make kibbeh (i.e. bake instead of fry it) — frankly, the cookbook is worth it just for the baked baklawa cheesecake recipe.

Farther north and on the outskirts of Stockholm, 28-year-old Magnus Nilsson favours foods he has foraged himself to craft the oat and fermented mushroom juices of his restaurant, now cookbook, Fäviken (Phaidon, $49.95). The absence of cooking times or specific temperatures in some recipes makes the book more about the philosophy of Scandi cooking than technique or execution at home, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.